Software defined networking (SDN) is a next generation data network in which the control plane is separated from the data plane and implemented in a software application. This architecture allows network administrators to have programmable central control of network traffic without requiring physical access to the network's devices. Thus, SDN decouples network control (e.g. learning and forwarding decisions) from the data plane used to forward network traffic. Decoupling the control plane from the data plane of the network enables the network controller to efficiently control the network traffic through globally optimized traffic engineering and routing, which departs from locally optimized shortest path forwarding (SPF). SDN may also simplify network operations, or even have the capabilities to flatten the network with extended data routing vectors. The extended data routing vectors in SDN can cover network information from multiple Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) layers (e.g. Layer 2 (L2) and/or Layer (L3)) for intelligent routing purposes. A basic approach to achieve decoupling of the network control from the network topology and data plane is by applying globally aware and topology decoupled software control at the edges of the network. The assumption is that traditional topology-coupled bridging and routing may be re-used at the core of the network so that scalability, interoperability, high availability, and extensibility of the conventional networking protocols, such as Internet Protocol (IP) networks can still be maintained.